Intel unveils the 8th Gen Intel Core processor family and launches the first of the family on Monday, Aug. 21, 2017. The 8th Gen Intel Core processors are designed for what’s next and deliver up to 40% gen over gen performance boost. (Credit: Intel Corporation)

Intel has officially launched their 8th generation processor family, starting off with the Kaby Lake Refresh processors for low power notebooks. The new family is looking to be an interesting one that will range from 14nm Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake chips to the 10nm Cannonlake chips, all of which will be branded as 8th generation.

So just yesterday, we were talking about Intel’s 8th generation mobility family with 15W TDP. The lineup will be featuring four SKUs that includes Core i7-8650U, Core i7-8550U, Core i5-8350U and the Core i5-8250U. The main advantages of the 8th generation family over the 7th generation are very obvious as can be noted by the specifications. First of all, there are no architectural changes on Kaby Lake Refresh processors. Each processor comes with twice the number of CPU cores and threads compared to last generation, a faster graphics engine and all of this under the same 15W TDP.

It’s interesting that most of the specifications we are looking here were previously offered in CPU SKUs with TDPs of up to 45W. Having the number lowered to 15W means we can see some really interesting specifications in the upper range of products. Probably 6 cores for the mainstream or high-end notebook processors sounds really good. The downside of having higher cores in a 15W package is that the base frequencies have taken a hit but that is compensated by the boost clocks which remain unprecedentedly high, reaching up to 4.2 GHz. Let’s take a look at the specifications of the Kaby Lake Refresh family before moving forward.

Intel 8th Generation Kaby Lake-U (R) Processors:

CPU Name

Cores

Threads

Base Clock

Boost Clock

L3 Cache

iGPU

iGPU Base / Boost Clock

TDP

Price

Intel Core i7-8559U

4

8

2.7 GHz

TBD

8 MB L3

Iris Plus 650 (with 64 MB eDRAM cache)

300 / 1100 MHz

28W?

TBD

Intel Core i7-8650U

4

8

1.9 GHz

4.2 GHz

8 MB L3

UHD 620

300 / 1150 MHz

15W

$409 US

Intel Core i7-8550U

4

8

1.8 GHz

4.0 GHz

8 MB L3

UHD 620

300 / 1150 MHz

15W

$409 US

Intel Core i5-8350U

4

8

1.7 GHz

3.6 GHz

6 MB L3

UHD 620

300 / 1100 MHz

15W

$297 US

Intel Core i5-8250U

4

8

1.6 GHz

3.4 GHz

6 MB L3

UHD 620

300 / 1100 MHz

15W

$297 US

Intel Core i3-8130U

2

4

2.2 GHz

3.4 GHz

4 MB L3

UHD 620

300 / 1000 MHz

15W

TBD

Intel has also updated the graphics engine to UHD 620. Compared to HD 620, the updated version provides support for 4K content playback. It does not generally point to its graphical prowess, but just shows that it is capable of handling media and content playback and support capabilities. Overall, the new processors will be able to deliver a 40% improvement in performance when being compared to the previous generation.

Intel 8th Gen 15W CPU Launch Presentation:

A few other examples of the profound impact this performance leap will have:

Editing photos or creating a slideshow? That’s up to 48 percent faster on 8th Gen vs. devices powered by the processor we released last year. Now imagine that compared to a 5-year-old device.

Editing video footage is now up to 14.7x faster, so rendering what used to take 45 minutes on a 5-year-old PC, now takes three minutes.

It’s easier than ever to enjoy your favorite shows in 4K UHD, including new content coming soon from Amazon Prime Video and Vudu, as well as everything already available from Netflix, Sony Pictures ULTRA and iQiyi.

You can try out new advancements like Windows Mixed Reality or go even more immersive with Thunderbolt 3 external graphics (up to 4K) for enhanced gaming and VR.

The first wave of 8th Gen Intel Core processor-powered devices featuring i5/i7 processors will come to market beginning in September, and we can expect more than 145 designs to choose from when launched. But the more interesting stuff is what comes later.

The Intel 8th generation family will be based around multiple CPU architectures. While Kaby Lake Refresh aims for the U-series platforms, other platforms such as the Y-series (Ultra Low TDP), the H-Series (Performance Laptops) and S-Series (Desktop PCs) processors will be using the 14nm Coffee Lake and 10nm Cannonlake architectures.

What’s interesting is that we have a bit more information on the Coffee Lake launch. The Coffee Lake processors will be announced earlier but they won’t be available in the market up till early October. The processors will launch along side the Z370 family while the budget aimed B360 and H370 chipsets will be available later in Q4 2017. There will also be a new chipset known as Z390 which will be offered for 8th generation desktop processors but no details are available on that specific SKU. Finally, we have the first official packaging pictures of the Intel Core i7 and Core i5 desktop range of processors that you can see below.

Intel 8th Generation Coffee Lake Desktop CPU Box Packaging

We can expect more announcements in the coming months by Intel as their products are announced for other platforms so stay tuned as always!

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